


Times and Hours

by El Juno (ElJuno)



Category: Manic Street Preachers
Genre: Infidelity, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-10
Updated: 2011-11-10
Packaged: 2017-10-25 21:53:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/275214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElJuno/pseuds/El%20Juno
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The first time that they actually slept together [...] was precisely three weeks and six days too late." Nicky, Richey, memories and crazy times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Times and Hours

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a happy story, and it deals with Nicky and Rachel, so you may want to skip it if that's something that squicks you.

The first time that they actually slept together - really slept together without the excuse of mutual drunkenness and the thin pretence of heterosexuality provided by the presence of some girl whose name would never be remembered the next morning - was precisely three weeks and six days too late. In later years, in the rare moments when he would allow himself unkind thoughts about Richey, Nicky would be tempted to read some small amount of spite on Richey's part into that fact. Whether you saw what happened as seduction or submitting to the same on whoever's part you wanted, the first time Nicky broke his wedding vows in the only way he ever really would, came before he'd even had a chance to acquire a tan line around the ring on his finger. And it was tempting to think that it was, in a way, Richey re-staking his claim.

Not that it was Richey's fault. Or, not solely, at least.

Not that Richey had been thinking that consciously, as far as Nicky knew.

But still.

It never should have been a surprise. If anything, it should have been a surprise that it took so long. Twenty-seven days after Nicky's wedding, slightly after midnight, lights low, sitting on opposite hotel beds, Richey surprisingly sober (in that he was only half-drunk), talking about nothing, really, in low, quiet voices. It shouldn't have been a surprise, at all.

Nicky never could deny Richey anything. Never could say no.

And Richey was doing so badly, falling apart so fast...

And it had been there forever.

And, really, he wanted to.

It was so easy to close that space, pull Richey close, close those last few inches between them and pull Richey over onto his bed. So fucking easy.

Not that any of this made it any better or worse as an action, but it's a point of order to keep in mind, perhaps.

Afterwards, Nicky spent twenty minutes washing his mouth out, forty minutes reassuring Richey (who, to be honest, was just amused by it all) that the previous twenty minutes had been nothing personal, three hours fighting his own feelings of guilt as he watched Richey sleep, ten minutes losing that fight, ten minutes getting redressed, twenty minutes trying to write a note which mostly came out as a mess of undifferentiated ink with the occasional borderline-legible word (usually 'and' or 'the' or 'Richey' or 'Rachel') less than one minute leaving it and slipping out the door and three or so hours mostly sitting next to the side of the hotel and carefully not thinking. Not-thinking as hard as he could, not-thinking harder than he'd never not-thought before in his life.

Fifteen minutes spent making his way back to an empty room and a missing note. Nicky was reasonably certain that he'd managed to steel himself enough by then and that things were totally fine. It was almost a let down that Richey wasn't there for Nicky to show off how fine he was, how normal he was acting. James did shoot him a somewhat suspicious look thirty minutes later when he came to slam on the door to wake Nicky and Richey up, though. And an even more suspicious look five minutes later when Richey nonchalantly sauntered in. Totally normal, though he was perhaps just a bit, just a tiny bit, too scrupulous in managing to not be directly next to Richey or alone with Richey unless he couldn't avoid it; though he was maybe just a tiny bit too incredibly, showily casual; though his stomach kept churning in a way that he would blame on nervousness at the flight, on airsickness for the fourteen hours they were actually on a plane. He had it all down, he knew he did, nothing was obvious, nothing had changed and nothing would ever have to change. And he was totally not-guilty.

He was home for forty-five minutes before he threw up for the first time.

Spent three days carefully avoiding the phone, smiling at Rachel in a way that he hoped wasn't suspicious, and groaning and vomiting as his guilt and tension took psychosomatic form as a killer case of stomach flu.

On the third day, he started answering the phone again when Richey called. He couldn't keep it up. Didn't really want to, anyway. He didn't like not having Richey around. And, if he was being totally honest, he had to admit that his worry at what he might have done to Richey's not-exactly-stable frame of mind provided the impetus for at least one of his three days of guilt.

And, anyway, he worried.

He always worried.

On that level, at least, nothing changed.

The second time they slept together was over a year later. In France, after one long drawn thin spun and too-breakable Year From Hell on a bad night, a long night, and it was an accident. Not a mistake, never a mistake...or, at least, as long as it was Richey who was hearing the story, it was never a mistake. But an accident. Even the tiny amount of planning, the bit of thought given to their first time was totally absent.

In retrospect, Nicky would never be able to fully reconstruct it. In memory it would always play out in his head less as a film clip or straight narrative and more as a series of not-totally-still images, semi-disembodied sensations. In Nicky's mind, one moment he was sitting on the bed looking at Richey who was looking at the floor, not making eye contact; the next he was holding Richey, one hand tangling in his hair, muttering something he-hoped-comforting under his breath; the next he was flat on his back on the bed, his shirt long gone, Richey's teeth nipping at his collarbone, Richey's hand just starting to sneak under the band of his trousers. And on. Like that. Just flashes.

For all his memory disconnect, however, Nicky woke the next morning with a totally clear head and not even the tiniest bit of confusion to help him, nothing to use as the base of a good alibi, if he ever needed one.

Raising his hands, he could see light-but-darkening bruises circling his wrists. Upon rolling slightly and kicking the covers slightly off, he discovered another, larger and darker, on his left hip, though he would never be able to remember what had caused it. And then he felt fingers against his shoulder blade, lightly at first, then slightly harder, and he turned to see Richey watching him carefully.

'I'm sorry,' Richey said, and he looked as if he meant it.

Nicky schooled his face as best he could to show nothing except fondness. 'Don't be,' he said, then broke their eye contact and grabbed Richey's hand, pressing a kiss gently into the palm. 'It's all right', he said, though he only thought the second part, the just be all right. He thought it hard at Richey, or in his direction at least, and that had to be worth something.

Two days later, Nicky found himself sitting and absently fingering the only-slightly-faded bruises on his wrists as the doctors stitched up Richey's chest, trying not to feel betrayed at Richey for breaking the promise he'd never actually gotten around to making him make. And the bruise on his hip was still in light shades of almost-gone green and yellow the night he found Richey outside hitting his head against the wall and realised that it was time for them to go home (and he couldn't handle any of this any more anyway, not really) and only slightly lighter when they got home. It was long-gone and he would have been hard-pressed to point out where it had once been by the time they let Richey back out of the hospital, though.

If Rachel had noticed it, she never said a thing.

The third time...

There was almost a third time.

Almost, almost, not quite.

Richey was a week out of the hospital, then. Nicky endlessly worried, they got as far as lying together on the sofa in front of the telly at Richey's flat, as far as Richey's hand slipped down Nicky's pants, as far as kissing before Nicky said, 'No'. A horrible thing, that. Not that he said it, but that when he said it, he said it hoping that he'd be ignored. It would have been out of his hands, then, having his cake and eating it too, and able to say that this time - this time at least - he hadn't wanted it. That it wasn't his fault.

That time, at least.

But Richey drew back apologetically, immediately, wiped his mouth carefully with the back of his hand and didn't so much as look at Nicky for the rest of the night (or, at least, every time Nicky looked, Richey was looking somewhere else) Stayed constantly three inches away, the breadth of one hand.

After that, never again. Never even another real chance after that one, really. And Nicky had a million worries and sorrows and regrets over Richey's place in his life but, oddly, that was rarely one of them in and of itself. At any point where he wished it had gone seriously differently, he usually wished that it had started earlier rather than had happened more frequently. That one of those nights in bed at Philip's he'd rolled over and managed to create at least one memory of sleeping with Rich that was less sad and guilty and more happy and drunken and goofy, a nice match to his other favourite memories of Richey.

His wish that he'd been tempted for longer afterwards, of course, went without saying.

Usually, though, it was one of those things about which he had no real regrets (that he would claim), just another one of those facts of their shared history. All numbers: played football with Rich 781 times, stayed up all night watching crap telly with him 27 times after the end of university, wrote three albums with him, worried about him more times than he could count, had sex with him twice. It wasn't a count he gave out all that often (or, for that matter, at all), but it really wasn't the most important one, anyway.

There was more, of course. Always. The morning of the phone call that began, 'I don't want to worry you, but...' And how he rushed to Richey's flat and let himself in and waited - never saw him, obviously, but caught a surprising glimpse of what he thought looked like a familiar bit of paper covered in ink scrawl (and the occasional borderline-legible word, usually 'and' or 'the' or 'Richey' or 'Rachel'). And how he spent years wishing he'd pocketed it when he had the chance and wondering where it had ended up at the last - storage, landfill, police file, the hands of the Edwardses - but never asked or could ever think of how to ask, anyway. Any one of a million times someone tried to get a piece of Richey through him, and sometimes he gave it to them and sometimes he didn't. A million conversations with James, with Sean and with Rachel and and and...

And years later, then. Talking to Rachel. Years after the reality of Richey had faded to the memory of Richey, but before the moment he woke up and realised that the memory of Richey had taken its rightful place as the voice in his head. No real build up to it, no real reason, just all coming out in one rush - 'I cheated on you, you know.'

Rachel shot him an unreadable glance. Not quite a glare.

'Twice.' He continued. 'With Richey.'

'Yeah, I know.' She responded, expression softening into something between annoyance and affection. She spent a few seconds visibly fumbling for a response before she just settled on 'It was a crazy time.'

And Nicky thought that he couldn't have said it better himself.

And that might not have been enough, or it, or the end, but it was an end, at least.


End file.
